Neuköllner Oper was founded in 1977 by the composer and church musician Winfried Radeke. Until 1981, Radeke rehearsed and performed with his independent music theatre group in various churches. From 1981 onward, they moved into a factory loft and alternated between different theatre stages. Both the fact that the company was founded by an artist rather than a state institution, and its itinerant rehearsal and performance practice, continue to shape the venue’s independent, flexible, and open-minded spirit to this day.
In 1988, the Neuköllner Oper acquired its own theatre space in the ballroom of the Passage Neukölln, offering 200 seats in the main hall and up to 50 in the studio. In 1996, Winfried Radeke invited director and author Peter Lund to join the artistic leadership. With works such as Babytalk, Elternabend, Das Wunder von Neukölln, and Stella, Lund also established the house internationally as a trendsetter in the field of the new German musical.
In 2004, dramaturge and author Bernhard Glocksin succeeded Winfried Radeke and Peter Lund. He advocated opening the company to additional performance practices, a radical re-examination of the operatic repertoire, collaborations with independent ensembles such as the STEGREIForchester, the VKKO, and the Trickster Orchestra, as well as a stronger international orientation.
At the beginning of the 2025/26 season, Rainer Simon assumed artistic leadership. Programmatically, he builds above all on the Neuköllner Oper’s tradition of sensuous, accessible, and low-threshold music theatre by focusing on contemporary pop culture and its various forms. At the same time, he seeks to intensify artistic exchange with the diverse communities in the North Neukölln neighborhood.
Rainer Simon leads the Neuköllner Oper together with Andreas Altenhof and Marta Hewelt.
